A service provider is a company that makes one or more services (e.g., telecom, internet, cable TV, satellite TV, etc.) available to its customers or subscribers.
One example of a telecommunication service is a telephone subscription, which may include, for example, access to telephone services on a prepaid, fixed or unlimited subscription plan. The telephone service may use any one of a variety of different networks (e.g., 3g, 4g, LTE), have different caps or limits, include voicemail service (or not), include multimedia service (or not), include short message service (SMS) (or not), etc. Some subscription plans may include telephone services as well as other services, such as television over cable, fiber or satellite, etc.
Service providers typically own or rent infrastructure that supports providing the services. The infrastructure may include, for example, one or more network elements that facilitate rendering the services. Network elements are devices (e.g., Remote Authentication Dial-In User Services (RADIUS) routers, Home Location Registers (HLR), Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAM), soft switches, web servers, (DOCSIS) cable modems, embedded multimedia terminal adapters (E-MTA), set-top boxes, optical network terminals (ONT), modems xDSL, FTP/TFTP servers, cable modem termination systems (CMTS), etc.) that provide or facilitate providing one or more services on a service provider's infrastructure.
The network elements may communicate through different communication channels such as, for example, SNMP, TL1, Telnet, SSH, FTP, HTTP, LDAP, CORBA, SQL, Netconf, DOCSIS, etc. They may follow different protocols and may be implemented using different programming languages. Moreover, the protocols and programming languages may differ depending on the vendor (e.g., who manufactures the device), model and version.
Typically, the service provider provides any services needed to satisfy the requirements of the subscription plans he or she sells. For example, a “GSM free” subscription plan offered by a telecommunications service provider may include services such as voicemail, SMS and a phone line. As another example, a satellite TV subscription may include, for example, the availability of some TV channels and some occasional promotions. Once a service provider sells a new subscription plan, he or she typically needs to activate the underlying services within his or her infrastructure in order for the subscriber to receive the service(s) he or she is paying for. Typically, the service provider can start charging for the subscription only once the service is enabled or activated, hence there is a need to make this happen, and it is desirable to do this quickly, and with an efficient use of resources. Analogously, the service provider may need to interact with his or her infrastructure for subscription deactivations or modifications, or when one or more of the network elements in the infrastructure is to be modified, replaced or removed.
The process of managing a service provider's infrastructure (e.g., to activate, deactivate, or modify) services, etc. can be complex, difficult, time consuming, and expensive.